Can passion and money go together? -By Vanshika Giria DU

"Passion is not something you follow. Passion is something that will follow you as you put in the hard work to become valuable to the world" - Cal Newport, author of So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why skills trump passion in the search for work you love. People tend to get confused while choosing passion or money. I often wonder can passion and money go together?

One of the most puzzling questions for any millennial to ponder upon is 'What should I do in my life?, and the most common and obvious answer received to this query is ‘Just follow your Passion’. No doubt it sounds very convincing but that's the half-truth or one side of the coin. On flipping the coin we often realise that the other face of the coin is equally important i.e., we also need to ensure economic sustenance. 

Be wise while following the advice

My views completely differ from the notion of following your passion as I firmly believe that money can buy happiness. I know this is not the stuff which magazine covers portray or elders suggest and it's also against what our society tells us to do with our lives. But it's a child's play to misinterpret a hobby or interest for a profound passion that could lead to a secure and stable career. The reality is, while everyone is born with a unique combination of talents, most people's inner guitar does not produce a tune to which they can hear and dance to.

So when one is advised to follow his inner-voice to excel in his life, which isn't there, he is left baffled and feels unnecessarily demotivated. This Pursue-Your-Passion-Business is probably more suitable for someone who's born rich or holds a tenured academic position as compared to the rest of 99% lost wanderers who lack any grand passion.

Race beyond your limits

Pursuing passion hinders you from expanding beyond your comfort zone. As Harry Briggs, Venture Capitalist and former partner at BGF Ventures put it, ‘If you just want to pursue something you enjoy, that might be a sign of laziness rather than genuine passion.’

Also, the authors of a recent Stanford research paper in Psychological Science-Carl Dweck, Gregory Walton and Paul O'Keefe say, ‘Urging people to find their passion may lead them to put all their eggs in one basket but then to drop that basket when it becomes difficult to carry.’ The researchers concluded that popular mantras like ‘follow your passion’ make people think that pursuing a passion will be easy. Believers are then more likely to give up when they face challenges or roadblocks. They also found that focusing on following a single passion made people less likely to consider new potential areas of interest. Instead of thinking of your career as an opportunity to follow your passion, the researchers suggest that one must think of life as a series of opportunities to develop several passions.

A hobby is more fun without money

As Miya Tokumitsu wrote in her viral 2014 article for Jacobin, 'Superficially, DWYL (Do What You Love) is an uplifting piece of advice, urging us to ponder what it is we most enjoy doing and then turn that activity into a wage-generating enterprise. But why should our pleasure be for profit? Who is the audience for this dictum? Who is not?’, I absolutely agree with her, as why is monetizing passion the best thing to do with it? Why not keep money at bay when pursuing your beloved hobby? The analogy here is that it's much more motivating to go for a run because it's fun than because I must get fit or lose some weight. The more people focus on money, the less they will focus on satisfying their intellectual curiosity, learning new skills, or having fun, and those are the very things that make people internally happy. It's a taboo that passion can easily drive money, the truth is that even money can and should be converted into a passion.

Passion to Money: How is possible?

In today's world, we need to attend to our lower order Maslow's needs of food and shelter and the like along with focusing on the upper-level needs of love, esteem, and self-actualization. This can be achieved with our strengths as investing more on our strengths will make them perfect. Achieving small victories in the field where our strengths lie motivates us to conquer the next hardship, and the next, and the next; until one day when we wake up to realize that we are getting paid to do what we love.
This article was submitted as an entry to Become an Author 2.0 with Dare2Compete.